Notes on the transmission of cholera from one country to another / by Robert Lawson.

  • Lawson, Robert
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Notes on the transmission of cholera from one country to another / by Robert Lawson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    HOLERA from one Country to Another. By Robert Lawson, LL.D., Q.H.P., Inspector- Oeneral of Hospitals. [Read in Section I of Seventh International Congress of Hygiene and Deraograpliy, 11th August, 1891.] To draw up a plan to prevent tlie extension of disease, say cholera, from one country to another, with any prospect of success, it is necessary that we should have a general acquaintance at least with the different factors which contribute to this result, and of their mode of operation. The information on these points, among the members of the medical profession, is at present very far short of these requirements, and its increase has been enormously impeded by the mass of the profession having adopted the belief that man himself was the chief agent in diffusing this disease, by their formulating on this assumption modes of operation which they deem it should follow in its development, and their interpreting the evidence derived from various sources with a strong bias in favour of the theory. There has been, in short, and still remains, a most serious error in assuming that personal communication was so powerful a factor as many believed, and a no less extensive error in the methods and reasoning by which the central idea of diffusion by man were advocated. Before efficient progress can be made there must be a complete change in all these respects; the character and causes of cholera must be derived from a critical examination of all the evidence nature presents us with, and we must look for their eluci- dation to the study of the real methods she herself adopts, instead of endeavouring to lay them down for her from our a priori deductions. It is generally recognised that cholera presents itself in two distinct forms, viz., that of simple or summer cholera, or cholera nostras, in which, with cramps and vomiting, and diarrhoea, the evacuations remain bilious, there is but rarely collapse, and the A 2